Office 365's free terabyte leaves Amazon's Glacier melting

Redmond's cloud storage is cheaper and faster to restore than AWS's data locker

Microsoft last week flicked the switch on its offer of 1 terabyte of storage for all Office 365 users.

The new deal has been read as a strike at Google's online offerings. But if you can find an envelope and a pencil stub, it looks like Redmond is taking a swipe at Amazon Web Services' Glacier cold storage facility, too.

Here's the maths.

Glacier costs one cent per gigabyte per month.

That's $US10.24 – or £5.99 and $AUD10.90 - per terabyte a month.

Office 365, which now comes with a terabyte of OneDrive, starts at $US5.00, £3.90 or $AUD5.60 a month.

Office 365 is clearly cheaper, and you get a productivity suite thrown in! And OneDrive has none of the upload and retrieval costs Amazon Web Services charges Glacier users.

Let's not forget, also, that Glacier takes three to five hours to deliver data. OneDrive is disk, so there's no wait.

But what about API's, I hear you ask. Glacier has one that lets teach applications to upload files. OneDrive's API isn't quite as flexible, allowing uploads only if users request one but also offering the chance to do things like Excel mashups.

On paper and on price alone, OneDrive is therefore a threat to Glacier. That it is not designed as a dedicated cloud storage service goes against it, but we're sure clever Reg readers will find a way to make it sing if it makes sense to do so. ®